


wild heart

by pledispristin



Category: Wanna One (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Domestic, Folklore, Friends to Lovers, Light Angst, Living Together, M/M, Magical Realism, Mutual Pining, not really for the last two but!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-24 22:22:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16648961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pledispristin/pseuds/pledispristin
Summary: in which Ong Seongwoo agrees to share his home with someone that may or may not be human for eleven months——and gets a hell of a lot more than what he pays for.





	wild heart

**Author's Note:**

> a nine-tailed fox, or kumiho (구미호), is a fox spirit in korean folklore. i was doing research on folklore for another fic and got distracted by this because of this line on the [wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumiho): _Most legends state that while a kumiho was capable of changing its appearance, there is still something persistently fox-like about it._ u kno i HAD TO write fox spirit minhyun after that. i took some liberties with the folklore because it was hard to find sources but reading the page should give you a brief idea (though it's also explained later in the fic).
> 
> this is the first fic ive written in over two months and i'm pleased with it even if it's not perfect, so i hope you all like it too!!
> 
> the title is from bleachers's wild heart.

The first time Seongwoo sees him, it’s the night after the new moon. There’s a waxing crescent moon in the sky, illuminating the world ever-so-slightly, a mere slice of silver light.

He rings on Seongwoo’s doorbell at one in the morning, and, for a moment, Seongwoo thinks he’s hallucinating. There’s no lights on outside, and all of the houses in Seongwoo’s area are dark and silent. But it’s not unreasonable, his rational mind says, for a traveller to be caught in the middle of these country roads, for someone lost in the middle of nowhere to make a beeline for the only building with a light in the window.

He doesn’t know why the hairs on the back of his neck are standing up in fear. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

He opens the door. There’s a man standing on his doorstep, and for a second all Seongwoo can see is a dark mass before his eyes adjust to the lack of a light. The moon has caught on part of his face—on an eye, half of his mouth, a shoulder—and Seongwoo finds himself desperately longing for him to step fully into the light.

“Good evening,” the man says. His voice is pleasant, devoid of an accent of any kind, almost comforting in its total neutrality. Seongwoo almost wants to step aside, to let him into his house, to let him stay for as long as he needs, to give him _anything_ —

—but Seongwoo has lived in this house for long enough that he knows to be wary of strange men whose faces stay in the shadows. This area is just far enough away from the city that it attracts all kind of things, things that would much rather keep to the darkness of the countryside. He looks the man in the eye. “Can I help you?”

“You have something that belongs to me,” says the man, the pleasantness not leaving his voice. “I’d like it back, please.”

“What, exactly?” asks Seongwoo, resisting the urge to cross his arms. It would not do, his mother’s voice in his head says, to make an enemy of a creature you did not know the nature of. 

“A jewel,” says the man. “When you hold it up to the sunlight, it seems to change colour, and when you hold it up to your artificial lamps, it seems to have no colour at all.”

Seongwoo knows what he’s talking about. He’d found it that morning while weeding his garden—he’d been fascinated by it for all of twenty seconds, before he decided it was Bad News and tucked it away into his pocket. “I have it,” he says. “Come into the front room for now.” His mother’s rules run through his head. _Phrase everything exactly. Leave no loopholes open. Do not invite them into the house unless you have set down the parameters._ “Stay for twenty minutes. That should be enough time to find it.”

He turns back into the yellow light of the front room, hyper-aware of the strange man following him, and instantly moves to walk up the stairs. He’d placed the stone on his dresser when he’d returned into the house, and he finds it easily, the dullness of it almost as jarring as the brightness it had contained while it was under the sun. 

He goes down the stairs to see the strange man standing in his front room, bemused by its bareness. Seongwoo’s mother had always insisted on keeping nothing in the front room, out of fear of showing any monster something it didn’t want to see (or, alternatively, something it wanted to see so desperately that it would be dangerous if it did). Now that he’s inside, the light of the room illuminating his face, Seongwoo can make out his features. He’s handsome, tall, and there’s something foxlike about his face. His clothes though, are ragged and torn. 

Seongwoo has never seen such an enigma. He’s reminded of the jewel in the garden—the way he’d been fascinated by it, but also slightly disturbed, the way he’d _known_ it wasn’t something to mess around with. He wants to know everything about the mysterious man—but he knows it will end badly. 

“What’s your name?” he blurts out. 

The man cocks his head to one side, and for a second Seongwoo sees something flash in his eyes. It’s the first thing about him that hasn’t been _nice_ , the first thing that seems to suit the ragged clothes. “Minhyun,” he says, in a tone far from pleasant; the syllables are razor-sharp on his tongue, and his smile doesn’t reach his eyes in a way that seems almost cutting. 

Then the spell is broken, and the flash in his eyes dims. His smile is no longer cutting—just neutral, polite, painfully trustworthy. “Ah, my jewel. Could I have it back?”

Seongwoo passes it over, careful not to let his skin go into contact, but Minhyun’s fingers graze his wrist anyway. A spark of electricity runs up his spine. “Now, leave,” he says, keeping his voice even. 

Minhyun smiles. “Goodbye, Seongwoo,” he says, turning and leaving through the still-open door. 

Seongwoo watches him walk down the path and out of the fence before he realizes Minhyun had never asked for his name. 

 

Seongwoo sees him again two weeks later. It rains all night on the night of the full moon, and he hears the sound of a person walking along the road a little after sundown. He peers through his blinds to see a figure—tall, in ragged clothes, with a posture that seemed all-too-familiar. 

He sees him again on the next full moon, sitting on the side of the road, his head in his hands. And the next—lying down on the meadow in front of Seongwoo’s house, his posture tight in a way that betrayed his lack of sleep. 

The sight of him puts Seongwoo on edge, but it also sparks something in him—reignites the memory of fiery eyes and electric fingertips and a cutting, fox-like smile. 

 

The day of the full moon, he rings on Seongwoo’s doorbell in broad daylight. 

“Hello,” he says pleasantly. “Can I come inside?”

“I don’t have your jewel,” says Seongwoo, pushing the passive-aggression into his voice. 

“I know you don’t,” says Minhyun. He looks thinner, more tired, than he had that night in Seongwoo’s front room—his clothes are more ragged, and there are dark circles under his eyes. “That’s not why I’m here. Can I come inside?”

“Do you have something to give me?” Seongwoo asks. This time, he does cross his arms. 

It doesn’t seem to faze Minhyun. “No,” he says. “I need a place to stay. This was the only place I could think of.”

Seongwoo almost shows shock, but then he remembers that there are creatures out there that feed on emotions. He still doesn’t know what he’s dealing with with Minhyun—and if his mother had taught him anything, it was to not take risks until you knew all the parameters. “How long?”

“Eleven full moons,” answers Minhyun, so promptly that Seongwoo knows it’s true. 

_What are you?_ he thinks. Because he knows now, he’s certain, that Minhyun is not _human_. But the question of what he _was_ hangs in the air, a present elephant in the room.

“Eleven full moons,” he repeats. 

Minhyun nods. “You’ve got it.”

Seongwoo considers. His mother would kill him, he knows, if she knew he’d allowed a creature he didn’t know the nature of into this house. “You aren’t going to kill me, are you?” he asks hesitantly. 

Minhyun laughs dryly, and Seongwoo gets the impression that there’s an irony in the question that he isn’t catching on to. “No,” he says. “You can have my word.”

And Seongwoo knows, from all his mother has told him, that the oath of a non-human creature means _everything_. “Swear it,” he says. “Swear it—on that jewel that you carry around.”

“I swear,” says Minhyun. 

Seongwoo relaxes. “Then yes, you can come inside. For the next eleven full moons. After that, you can’t stay.”

He steps aside to let Minhyun into the house, before thinking of something. “But you need to earn your keep.” Minhyun frowns in confusion. “Help me with the gardening, or the cleaning, or the chores, or with feeding the fish. You can’t stay here for free.”

Minhyun mock-salutes. “Whatever you say, Seongwoo,” he says. His name sounds like a foreign word in Minhyun’s mouth—like he isn’t sure how to wrap his tongue around the syllables. It sounds almost electric coming from Minhyun’s mouth—like something _charged_ , like a lyric or a prayer. It’s a welcome departure from the polished pleasantry of everything else that he says. 

Perhaps this can work, he thinks. Provided that Minhyun doesn’t bite the bullet and kill him. 

 

They eat dinner together. 

It’s oddly stilted—Seongwoo isn’t used to cooking for others, and he doesn’t think Minhyun is used to eating around others either. Seongwoo makes a stew, and Minhyun siphons all the beef out of it. 

“Do you not eat meat?” he asks. 

Minhyun shakes his head. “I can’t,” he says, which is a very different reply to _I don’t_. 

_Why not_ sits on the edge of Seongwoo’s tongue. He pushes it down and takes another mouthful of stew. “You should have told me. I could make things that you don’t have to take the beef out of.”

“I didn’t want to be any trouble,” says Minhyun, his pleasant tone tinged with desperate earnestness. And despite himself, Seongwoo feels his heart flutter. 

“You wouldn’t be,” he says quickly. “I can find some other things to make. It’s not like I run out of vegetables.”

Minhyun smiles at him. His smile doesn’t reach his eyes again, but it’s not the same as his tight, too-pleasant smile. “If it’s no trouble.”

He steps outside at sunset. Seongwoo sees him in the back garden when he goes to put the trash out, sitting upright on the bench with the jewel in his lap. 

“How long will you be out?” he asks. 

“Till sunrise,” Minhyun says, his voice impossibly distant. It’s a warm night, and not too cloudy, so his whole face is lit up by the moonlight. 

Seongwoo nods. “Then. Let me give you the key to the back door.” Minhyun smiles, a real thing quirking his lips upwards, and Seongwoo thanks god for the darkness and the way that Minhyun still isn’t looking at him because he can feel his cheeks colour. Hastily, he adds, “There’s a lot of strange things that happen at night, and I don’t want anything to get into the house.”

Minhyun nods. “Of course.” He stands up, leaving the jewel sitting on the bench, and follows Seongwoo to the door. 

Seongwoo reaches into the room and yanks the key out of the lock, fully aware of Minhyun’s head over his shoulder. “Here,” he says, placing it into Minhyun’s hand. “Be sure to lock up.”

“Thank you,” says Minhyun, that same desperate earnestness in his voice. He’s not looking at Seongwoo, but rather at the ground, and Seongwoo finds himself _wishing_ that Minhyun will look up so he can see his face. 

He feels a rush in his chest, a sudden race of blood to his cheeks. “It’s no problem,” he says gruffly, but he gets the impression the attempt at aggressiveness had been lost on Minhyun. 

So he does what any self-respecting person would in an awkward situation and shuts the door in his face. Through the wood of the door, he hears Minhyun let out a startled laugh, before he turns the key in the lock and walks away, laughing softly to himself. 

Seongwoo stands there listening for an embarrassingly long time—especially when, two minutes later, he opens the window just above the bench and snaps, “Hey, asshole, don’t _leave the key in the lock_!”

 

Seongwoo is awake when Minhyun comes back in. He raises his hand in greeting. “Good morning.”

Minhyun smiles tiredly at him. “Good morning. You’re up early.”

“I have to make a living somehow,” says Seongwoo. Minhyun squints at him. “The vegetables I grow in the back garden. Every week, I walk up to the village and sell them at the market.” He laughs. “They’re quite popular.”

“The vegetables in the stew yesterday,” Minhyun says. “Were those yours?”

Seongwoo nods, proud—he’s always had a lot of pride in the garden, ever since his mother left it to him and it became his responsibility to maintain it. “Yep,” he says. “People always ask me for tips, but I don’t even know. It just kind of—happens naturally, I suppose.”

Minhyun hums vaguely. Seongwoo finds himself ever-so-slightly annoyed by it, irritated at the lack of a compliment. Desperate to fill the silence, he says, “Next week, you’re going to help me. I can’t ask you this week because you’ve been awake all night.”

Minhyun shakes his head. “I thought I had to _earn my keep_?” Again, Seongwoo can tell that the phrase is unfamiliar to Minhyun by the way his mouth curves around the vowels, as if they’re foreign to him. 

_What are you?_ he thinks. _What are you?_

“You do,” he says. “Starting from tomorrow.” Minhyun smiles, and this time it almost reaches his eyes—it’s the closest thing to real amusement he’s seen on him, and he finds himself _wanting_ —wanting desperately to see it again. 

He turns around and shakes his head, willing himself to snap out of whatever mood he’s gotten himself into. 

 

Three weeks later, and Seongwoo has to begrudgingly admit that Minhyun is a good house guest. He’s never had one before, but—he knows Minhyun has to be one, because he never seems to fuck anything up. 

He knows how to cook. He _doesn’t_ know how to garden, but he learns quickly enough. Sometimes, he sings—sings soft, sad songs in languages Seongwoo has never heard before, but that fill him with an unknown ache. 

“What song is that?” he asks one time while he does the dishes and Minhyun leans against the fridge singing something that makes Seongwoo feel nostalgic for a life he never had. 

“It’s nothing,” says Minhyun. “Something my mother used to sing to me before I slept.”

“What’s it about?” Seongwoo asks. The tap is running, but he doesn’t make any movement to switch the water off. 

“It’s about a woman who gets separated from her lover in a snowstorm,” says Minhyun. “It’s about—longing, for something that’s too far away for you to grasp, but that you want desperately.” 

His eyes are impossibly distant, and Seongwoo feels a chill. He can’t shake the distinct feeling that Minhyun is older than he looks, that there’s a thousand years behind his eyes. 

He laughs nervously to fill the silence. “Man. Your mom had depressing lullabies.”

Minhyun chuckles softly. “It’s a beautiful song,” he says. Seongwoo watches him stand up straight, watches an enigmatic smile cross across his mouth. “You should turn off the tap if you aren’t using it.”

Seongwoo sputters with indignation, because this is _his house_ , and Minhyun has no right to use his words against him, and _actually_ he’s a terrible house guest—

—but then Minhyun is laughing brightly, his face settling in the first real, full smile Seongwoo has seen on him, and the way his eyes crinkle almost knocks the air out of Seongwoo’s lungs. His throat closes up. 

He watches Minhyun disappear down the corridor and thinks _God, I’m fucked_. 

 

That full moon, Seongwoo locks the door when he goes to take out the trash, and sits beside Minhyun on the grass. He’s done away with the bench this time, and instead is sat cross-legged beside the pond, the jewel sitting on his other side.

“Hello, Seongwoo,” he says pleasantly when Seongwoo sits down. It’s been a month, but Seongwoo is still unnerved by it—by now, Minhyun has learned to say Seongwoo’s name in his regular tone, has absorbed the syllables into his clipped, amiable tone. (Despite himself, Seongwoo almost misses it.)

“Don’t talk like that,” Seongwoo blurts instead of _hi_. Minhyun drags his eyes away from the surface of the water to gaze at him quizzically, and Seongwoo feels a chill rush through him at the sight of his eyes. He’s reminded suddenly of the flash in Minhyun’s eyes the first time he’d met him, the way he seemed almost razor-sharp, hollow in his gauntness. 

“What’s wrong with it?” Minhyun says softly. The words go straight to the pit of Seongwoo’s stomach, coiling up inside him like a venomous snake. _There’s nothing dangerous here,_ he thinks. _This is Minhyun._

“It’s creepy,” he says. “It’s like—it’s like you’re not a real person.”

Minhyun laughs hollowly. “I think you and I both know I’m not a real person.”

It’s the first time either of them have spoken of it—the elephant in the room finally acknowledged. “I’m not sure you should be waving that fact around like that,” says Seongwoo.

Minhyun laughs. “I’ve been here for a month,” he says. “If you were going to do anything about it, you would have already. I know you know, because you haven’t treated me the way humans treat other humans.” He turns his head and looks back onto the rippling surface of the water. “Where did you get the fish?”

“I don’t know,” Seongwoo says. “They’ve been living in this pond for as long as I can remember.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

Minhyun leans closer to the surface of the pool. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

“You aren’t human,” says Seongwoo. “There’s many things that people don’t think are possible, but that happen anyway.”

Minhyun sighs. “Must be nice,” he says idly, “to just float around in the water, swimming and eating and swimming, not knowing that each day could be your last.” He laughs hollowly, seemingly half to himself and half to Seongwoo, and Seongwoo can’t shake the feeling that he’s intruding on Minhyun’s thoughts. 

Seongwoo tilts his head towards him. “Are you mortal?” he asks, which isn’t much of a question.

Minhyun only laughs. “I will be,” he replies, which isn’t much of an answer.

 

“You never buy from our stall anymore,” says Daniel, halfway through picking out carrots from Seongwoo’s stock.

Seongwoo considers, then realizes that Daniel is right. For the last six weeks—ever since Minhyun had arrived at Seongwoo’s doorstep with his strange pleasantry and unwillingness to eat meat—Seongwoo hadn’t bought any meat from the Kangs. “I’m sorry,” he says honestly. “I have someone living with me now, and he doesn’t eat meat.”

His eyes catch on Minhyun, in avid conversation with Jo Haseul who makes scarves and shawls, a strange kind of fascination in his eyes. Daniel follows his gaze. “This person you’re living with,” he says, a knowing smile in his voice. “Is he your boyfriend?” 

“No,” says Seongwoo, all-too-quickly, and Daniel shoots him a smirk of satisfaction. “He’s just someone I’m living with.”

But when he and Minhyun walk back, and Minhyun tells him evenly about how fascinating humans are because they’ve decided that they should spin wool into scarves, Seongwoo wonders what it would really be like to link his hand with Minhyun’s. If Minhyun wasn’t living in his house, and if he was _human_ —Seongwoo thinks he would.

 

Seongwoo joins Minhyun for the next full moon. And the next. And the next. And the next. 

It becomes a tradition. They don’t talk much past exchanging pleasantries. From what Seongwoo can gather, Minhyun needs to be outside the whole night, and the jewel needs to be exposed to the moonlight that entire time. Sometimes, Seongwoo finds himself nodding off. On the night of the third full moon, Minhyun spends the entire night shivering—on the night of the fourth full moon, Seongwoo brings down a spare jacket.

They don’t look at each other on full moon nights. Full moons draw out the monstrosity in Minhyun, and the humanity in Seongwoo. But it’s comforting to be there, beside him, watching the night turn into day. 

On the night of the fifth full moon, Minhyun sprawls out on the grass and says, “Tell me about yourself.”

Full moon nights seem to dull their inhibitions. They speak to each other with honesty, with truth, without fear. 

So Seongwoo does. He tells him about how his mother had moved away from the city into this house after her aunt died, about how she’d been constantly wary of the _creatures_ that kept their base around these parts, about how she’d drilled the rules into his head since he was old enough to know what they meant. 

“I lived in the city, for a while,” says Minhyun. “But it didn’t work out. There were too many lights.”

“There’s a lot of lights out here too,” says Seongwoo, pointing to the stars. But he knows what Minhyun means—he’d been to the city only twice, and he’d been stunned by how many lights there were, dulling the ones that actually sat in the sky, making it impossible to know if a light you were looking at was a star or a plane or a distant skyscraper.

He tells Minhyun how he’d been home-schooled, how he’d been taught to read and write and mow the grass and plow the vegetable garden. “It was natural for me, though.”

“This place is a good place to grow things,” says Minhyun. He doesn’t elaborate, and for a second Seongwoo wonders if he’s fallen asleep, but then he speaks. “The first time I saw this house, when I was looking for the jewel, I _knew_ it would be here. It’s like—it’s like a beacon, for things that are good and valuable and _alive_.” He sighs softly, almost wistfully. “I think that’s why the vegetables grow so well, and why the fish are still alive after all this time. The universe wants to keep this place living.”

“You talk about being alive as if you aren’t,” says Seongwoo. 

“Am I?” Minhyun says. His voice is different all of a sudden—more raw, more real, and Seongwoo decides he could listen to this version of his voice all day. “I’ve understood now that the way of mortals, of humans—there’s a push and pull. You have happiness, but you have to have sadness too. You have success, but there has to be failure too—because that means you have something to be successful _for_. Everything you people do—it’s done for a _reason_.” He laughs, but without mirth, an irony that Seongwoo doesn’t understand but that he’s starting to. “My kind aren’t like that. I wonder, then, if we’re truly living—if we’re truly alive.”

 _What are you?_ Seongwoo thinks. _What are you what are you what are you?_ Full moon nights dull their inhibitions, but not enough for Seongwoo to breach that line, to ask that forbidden question. 

So the words die in his throat, before he has a chance to form them with his mouth, the syllables lost in the expanse of his chest.

 

On the eighth full moon, Seongwoo kisses Minhyun.

There’s a tangible kind of tension between them, a world full of unspoken sentences and promises and confessions. Seongwoo finds himself longing for the electricity of Minhyun’s fingertips grazing against his forearm; finds himself wondering what Minhyun’s lips would feel like against his own. He doesn’t say anything.

And sometimes, he catches Minhyun’s eyes catching on Seongwoo’s mouth, or hears him laugh startledly at a joke that isn’t even funny, and he _knows_ that Minhyun feels the same way. He still doesn’t say anything, though. It’s out of a strange sense of misplaced justice— _technically_ , Minhyun is Seongwoo’s guest, so _technically_ , it should be Minhyun who does the confession.

He doesn’t want to admit that he’s too scared, but he is. He’s _terrified_. Minhyun no longer seems to him to be at all dangerous—but this precarious tightrope between the truth and the lie they tell themselves is. They’re standing on a precipice, and one step backwards would throw Seongwoo to his death.

But then the night of the eighth full moon comes—three months until Minhyun’s last full moon—and Seongwoo doesn’t want to stay on the edge anymore. Minhyun sings a song in a language Seongwoo doesn’t recognize quietly, animating the still night with his voice, and Seongwoo can only listen and pretend he’s not falling deeper and deeper into a hole he dug from himself. And then Minhyun sings a song Seongwoo _does_ recognize, and he lets out a startled laugh.

Minhyun smiles—Seongwoo isn’t looking him, but he can hear it in his voice. “You know the song?” he asks. “I heard it on the radio, a few times, while I was living in the city.”

Seongwoo stays silent. He doesn’t know what to say to that—doesn’t know what to say about the fact that Minhyun is singing in a language Seongwoo knows, is singing a song Seongwoo recognizes. His voice is somehow even more beautiful like this—it feels like it’s surrounding _everywhere_ , in both of Seongwoo’s ears and in his mind and in his heart. 

_Just like the star that doesn’t leave the dark night sky,_ Minhyun sings, and Seongwoo looks up at the stars and decides that Minhyun dulls their light more than any skyscraper ever could. 

“How was that?” Minhyun asks, and Seongwoo leans over and presses his mouth to Minhyun’s.

Minhyun lets out a soft sigh, melting into it, and Seongwoo’s heart does a leap because that means he’s not pushing Seongwoo away. His hands find their way into Minhyun’s hair, willing Minhyun to open his mouth, to stop the kiss from being so damn _chaste_ —

—and then Minhyun’s shoulders tense and he pushes Seongwoo away. “Don’t,” he says breathlessly. “Don’t do that.”

“You don’t want me to kiss you?” asks Seongwoo, the words a bit slurred by the thundering of his heart in his ears. 

“I can’t kiss you,” says Minhyun, which is a very different reply to _I don’t_. 

_Why not_ sits on the edge of Seongwoo’s tongue, and this time he lets it spill out, lets the bitterness on his tongue turn the words acidic. 

Minhyun sighs, and then he cups Seongwoo’s chin in his hand and tilts his face until he’s looking him in the eye. “Does this not scare you?” he asks, his voice low, his eyes impossibly dark. 

“No,” says Seongwoo.

Minhyun raises an eyebrow. “It scares me,” he says. “An impossible amount.”

Anger and indignation and something close to love flare up in Seongwoo. “Why?”

“Because I know if I let myself start falling in love with you I wouldn’t be able to stop until it burned us both up from the inside out,” says Minhyun. His eyes are dark, but impossibly gentle, and Seongwoo knows that the difference between them is that he never had a choice to start falling in love with Minhyun. 

“I’m not afraid of fire,” he says finally. Once, he may have been, but then he let Minhyun into his front room with his eyes like coal and his voice amiably petrifying, and he realized he couldn’t possibly be afraid of fire if he wasn’t afraid of him..

Minhyun nods. “I know,” he says softly. “But I am. I’d rather go a lifetime without you than to have to watch myself turn to ash with you.” He presses a kiss to Seongwoo’s cheek, his mouth lingering a second too much in desperate longing, and walks to the end of the garden, leaving the jewel on the bench. Seongwoo doesn’t follow him, but he picks up the jewel and places it safely in his lap. 

 

Two nights later, Seongwoo opens up the hatch into the attic and climbs the ladder upstairs. 

He hasn’t been in here for a long time—there’s a thick layer of dust coating everything, and boxes and boxes of his mother’s things. But he finds what he’s looking for pretty easily—it’s sitting atop of a box, bound in leather and thick with yellowed papers, and when he picks it up a layer of dust slides off. 

_Creatures of the Korean Countryside_ , the gold writing on the front cover reads. He holds it close to his chest and carries it into his bedroom, letting it fall open on a random page. Then, despite his best instincts, he closes the door and locks it. 

The page has fallen open on the entry for _goblin_ , and for a second Seongwoo relishes in the sight of his mother’s thin, clean handwriting before he remembers he has a task. He flips past pages on gods and monsters and dragons and spirits until his eyes land on the worn image of a fox with nine tails. 

_The nine-tailed fox,_ he reads, _is one of the most mysterious beings. Some say it is born, others say it is cursed, others say it is merely a common fox that lived a thousand years. It can transform into a shape similar to a human being, but retaining some fox-like characteristics._

Seongwoo thinks about Minhyun’s eyes and the curve of his jaw, and keeps reading. 

_Almost all of them are malevolent and bloodthirsty—they retain their energy from the devouring of human hearts. They begin to control a human being with a deep kiss, which allows them to absorb their energy._

_I can’t,_ Minhyun had said, and he’d stared at Seongwoo like he truly meant it. He reads on. 

_They wish to become human above all, and often resort to tricky methods in order to achieve this dream. However, the best way for them to become human is to exercise human values of abstinence, self-control, and willpower for a thousand days. If they can truly give up their fox nature, then they can become human._

There’s a note at the top of the page, in Seongwoo’s mother’s handwriting. _Not to be trusted,_ it reads, underlined several times and circled. _Never allow inside._

Seongwoo hears the back door open, and then a call of “Seongwoo?” He glances back at the note, and then at the words _malevolent and bloodthirsty_ , and then thinks back to Minhyun’s soft voice and the gentleness behind his knife-sharp features. 

_Sorry, mom,_ he thinks. _I’m making this decision for myself._

 

On the night of the ninth full moon, they sit shoulder to shoulder on the bench, and Seongwoo fights the urge to sprawl in Minhyun’s lap. Two days later, Minhyun holds Seongwoo’s hand on the way back from the market, and four days later, he watches Minhyun chops bell peppers and sings along to some girl group song on the Melon chart. 

It’s not enough. It’s almost _painful_ , to have the knowledge that he’s wanted ( _loved_ , his brain supplies) by someone he wants ( _loves_ ), and yet to do nothing about it. 

On the night of the tenth full moon, Seongwoo sits beside Minhyun in silence, thinking about the fact that they have only one more month together, thinking about how Minhyun fills up the space that he’s in and how empty his house will feel without his voice and his soft smiles and the way his affected pleasantries gave way to emotion and love and hope. 

Minhyun moves his hand into Seongwoo’s and squeezes, as if he’s memorizing the lines of his palm and the shape of his fingers, and Seongwoo is certain that he’s not the only one wondering what will happen when the eleven months end. Seongwoo doesn’t want him to leave. He wants Minhyun to stay forever, to be a permanent fixture, to chop his vegetables and spend too much money on Haseul’s shawls and to sing along to the Melon top 100 even if he doesn’t know the lyrics. 

He _wants_. 

And when he hears the birds start their first chorus at dawn, he asks softly, “You’re a nine-tailed fox, aren’t you?”

Minhyun’s breath catches audibly. “How long have you known?”

“A while,” Seongwoo says, and then, “My mother warned me about your kind.”

Minhyun lets out a sigh. “I know what my kind are,” he says. “I know what mortals think we all have to be, too. But I hope that you know that I’m not like that.”

“I know,” says Seongwoo. “I’m not afraid of you.” _I could never be afraid of you,_ he thinks, but he leaves it unspoken. 

Minhyun is silent for a long time, watching the first rays of golden sunlight break out in the darkness. And then he speaks. “I’ve always wanted to become human. For as long as I’ve known. And I searched for a long time, looking for how I was supposed to do it.” He laughs softly. “A lot of my kind believe the way to go about it is to eat the hearts of a thousand humans. But I saw people do that and go crazy from the bloodlust, get driven mad by the drive and the thirst, and I knew that couldn’t be the way.”

“What is the way?” Seongwoo asks. 

“To become truly human, a fox needs to give up its primal instincts,” says Minhyun. “We’re solitary creatures—we don’t follow rules, or calendars, or obligations. And we’re hungry creatures—when we want something, we take it. Willpower isn’t something my kind has.” Seongwoo moves a hand to Minhyun’s knee, steadying its nervous bouncing, and he feels Minhyun’s joints relax under his touch. “To become human, I needed to abstain from eating or killing any meat for a thousand days. And for every full moon of those thousand days, I needed to expose this jewel to the moonlight; from sunset to sunrise the next morning. I can’t transform back into a fox, and I can’t use any of my powers.”

“And you only have one month left?” Seongwoo asks. 

“One full moon,” says Minhyun. “Forty-one days in total.” 

“I’m not afraid of you,” says Seongwoo again.

“If I wasn’t trying to be human, I could have cut your heart out of your body by now,” says Minhyun softly. 

But Seongwoo doesn’t believe that—he can’t believe that the Minhyun he knows would have done that. _His_ Minhyun is kind, and gentle, and earnest—and he may be inhuman, but he’s full of humanity. “I don’t care,” he says, and means it. “I’m falling in love with you. I think I’ve already fallen.”

Minhyun leans towards him, pressing his lips to the side of Seongwoo’s mouth, and it’s almost tantalizing. “I can’t kiss you,” he says. “If I kissed you, I’d have to start everything all over again. If I kissed you, all the willpower would go out of the window.”

The sun has risen between their conversation, lighting up the garden and Minhyun’s features in a rosy glow. He’s impossibly beautiful in this light, Seongwoo thinks, his chest stretching to accommodate the swelling of his heart. He stands up, fixing Minhyun with a wry smile, and says, “No. But there’s other things you _can_ do.”

Minhyun lets out a startled laugh, filling up the daybreak with the sound, and Seongwoo decides that there’s nothing left to do but to let Minhyun take center stage in the expanse of his heart. 

 

“It’s the eleventh full moon,” says Minhyun, watching the sky from the grass on the night of the eleventh full moon.

“It is,” says Seongwoo.

“You told me I could only stay for the full moon,” says Minhyun, and Seongwoo can’t see his face but he can hear the mirth in his voice. 

“I said that, did I?” asks Seongwoo. “Maybe I’ll kick you out tomorrow morning, then.” But his hand is linked with Minhyun’s and he’s holding a laugh as close as he can to his chest, and he finds himself inexplicably holding it tighter and feeling the rush of electricity through his bones.

“You can stay forever,” he says finally. “If you wanted to.”

“I’d like that,” says Minhyun. “But I don’t want to be any trouble.”

Seongwoo laughs. “Oh, trust me,” he says. “You’ve been enough trouble for a lifetime, Minhyun.” 

(The _but I love you anyway_ goes unspoken.)

**Author's Note:**

> and then they lived happily ever after and eleven days later minhyun became a human being and kissed the heck out of seongwoo
> 
> thank you so much for reading!! u can find me on twitter [here](https://twitter.com/wannatheworid) and on curiouscat [here](https://curiouscat.me/hyeashope). i hope you enjoyed this!


End file.
